The 32nd Beijing International Book Fair closed on June 21 with solid numbers: 2,835 copyright agreements signed across 82 countries. But the real story was how China’s publishing industry is rebuilding itself around streaming commerce, AI-assisted editorial workflows, and transmedia IP.

By Eric Dupuy, Contributor

On the morning of the fair’s opening day, the director of the Beijing International Book Fair organizing office, accompanied by his interpreter Sean Xie, told a gathering of international journalists something that would have been unthinkable at the Frankfurt Book Fair: that AI is now embedded in every stage of the editorial process, from subject selection to print production. He framed it not as disruption but as an operating rhythm.

“In China, we simply have a shorter time to make decisions,” he said. “If it doesn’t work, we stop. In the West, you debate before you try.”

The remark crystalized the divergence in publishing cultures that pervaded BIBF 2026— and the distance China has traveled since the fair last drew a full international cohort.

The headline numbers were solid: nearly 300,000 visits, more than 1,700 exhibitors, 220,000 titles on display, and a copyright tally of 2,835 agreements. Children’s books, social sciences and science & technology led the rights categories. For the first time, participants from Hungary, Moldova and South Africa joined the roster, while the UAE took the role of Country of Honor, dividing its presence between a public-facing cultural pavilion on the ground floor and a dedicated rights-trading booth below—a spatial arrangement that itself signalled the fair’s dual ambition: consumer spectacle and B2B deal-making.

‘Content Ecosystems’

The most significant structural shift at BIBF 2026 was the formal arrival of China’s digital content majors on the show floor. Tencent, NetEase Games, Douyin Group, 37 Interactive Entertainment and Yuewen Group anchored a new Digital Publishing Joint Pavilion, turning a section of the China National Convention Center into what felt less like a book fair hall and more like a content industry trade show.

Yuewen, the web fiction subsidiary of Tencent, now supports 530,000 international original writers, hosts 820,000 original works online, and has had 38 titles formally inducted into the British Library—a data point that would have seemed eccentric five years ago.

The BIBF ComicHub, also debuting this year, gathered 29 global animation and comics publishers, while a new IP Licensing Zone presented more than 120 domestic and international intellectual properties to brand licensees and lifestyle buyers. The message was explicit: publishing in China is no longer a standalone sector. It is the upstream supplier of a content supply chain that runs through micro-drama platforms, AI animation studios, toy manufacturers, and subscription audio services.

Zhang Xian, who handles international licensing for Douyin Group’s web novel platform Fantasy Novels, described an architecture that is already mature. Web novels serialized on the TikTok ecosystem are converted into micro-dramas—episodes running roughly one minute each—then, if the fan base is strong enough, condensed into print editions published in partnership with traditional houses. The top-performing author on the platform has earned over 10 million RMB (approximately $1.3 million) from a single title. The direction of travel is from screen to page, not the reverse.

“It’s not book readers watching the micro-dramas,” Zhang Xian noted. “It’s people who don’t read books—but then they get interested in the story, and they buy the physical book.”

Streaming Commerce and the Margin Squeeze

At the stands of traditional Chinese publishers, the mood was more ambivalent. Representatives from Jieli Publishing House, a children’s and young adult imprint belonging to the Guangxi Publishing Media Group with approximately $66 million in annual turnover, described a business model under structural stress.

Jieli now operates two dedicated in-house livestreaming teams—six to eight staff in total— conducting daily sessions of three to four hours on Douyin and rival social commerce platforms. Livestreaming now accounts for roughly 25%–30% of total sales, with traditional e-commerce representing 60%–65% and physical bookshops a residual 5%–10%. The economics, however, are problematic.

“For most publishers in China, streaming is a loss-making channel,” a Jieli representative acknowledged, through interpretation. The cost base—staffing, returns, platform fees, and the mandatory price promotions that drive conversion—erodes margins that were already thin. Jieli tries to hold a floor price and refuses to participate in China’s major e-commerce promotional events, such as the June 18 shopping festival, where cross-brand discounts effectively mean selling at a loss. Yet the pressure is structural: platforms that once provided organic reach now charge heavily for visibility. “The margin will only fall further,” the rep said, adding that for publishers without the scale to absorb these costs, the channel may prove untenable.

Innovating Around the Book

CITIC Press, China’s largest trade publisher by market share with over 1,000 new titles per year and roughly half its catalogue acquired from international rights holders, presented a more optimistic picture of the digital transition. Its CITIC Library app (中信书院) has reached 10 million subscribers and now offers a layered content stack around each title: e-books, audiobooks, AI-narrated 15-to-20-minute summaries validated by in-house editors, and training courses, all integrated around a single print backlist that includes titles consistently in print for more than a decade.

CITIC’s showcase innovation at the fair was a set of NFC-enabled bookmarks tied to six classic titles. Priced at approximately 30 RMB for the collection (under €4), each bookmark provides direct access to audio content via NFC tap—no app download required. The product solves a known friction point in audio adoption, and represents the kind of low-cost, high-volume ancillary revenue stream that Chinese publishers are developing to offset falling margin on print.

“In China, branded bookmarks are already a significant merchandise category,” a CITIC rep noted. “We wanted to add a layer of new experience to an existing habit.”

The bookmarks were developed with a proprietary magnetic-compatible NFC solution that works on metal surfaces—a technical detail that illustrates the granularity of product development now common among leading Chinese houses.

The Limits of Internationalization

A quieter but instructive story came from Xu Guoping, vice editor-in-chief of Xinjiang Juvenile Publishing House, whose Beijing subsidiary PB has published roughly 300 projects—primarily picture books—since its creation in 2005. PB built its early catalogue on acquired international rights: one U.S. picture book series it imported sold over a million copies in China before PB lost the renewal rights at auction in 2014.

The lesson, Xu said, reshaped the house’s strategy entirely. “It’s not enough to have good content. You need editorial investment, promotion, and distribution — and when the book leaves the publisher, all of that disappears.” Since then, local creation has overtaken licensed content in sales contribution.

Xu is skeptical of transmedia pivot strategies pursued by peers. Her generation, she noted, grew up with physical play and face-to-face contact, and her publishing philosophy is rooted in values she considers durable: cultural tradition, human connection, moral depth.

Last year, a livestreaming session on Douyin moved 24,000 sets of one title in a single broadcast—not through discounting, but through content. “We want to attract readers with the book itself, not with the price,” she said. The result is that Xinjiang Juvenile’s digital revenues are growing through a partnership with a US audio distribution company rather than through domestic streaming commerce.

French Rights and the International Equation

For international publishers attending BIBF, the fair’s pivot toward transmedia IP is both an opportunity, and a complication.

France, once one of the leading sources of rights imports into China, has seen its position erode since 2019 alongside the broader slowdown in international rights acquisition. Sean Xie pointed to ongoing collaboration with the French Embassy’s cultural services and plans to launch an IP licensing initiative in partnership with the China Toy Association—a sign that the entry point for French content into China may increasingly run through licensing and character IP rather than translated publishing per se.

Elsewhere, the rights deals that were announced at the fair suggest the center of gravity in Chinese international co-publishing is still about scientific and academic content: Phoenix Publishing’s Yilin Press signed with Springer Nature to publish an English-language edition of a Peking University study on Sumerian civilisation; Cambridge University Press launched a condensed matter physics textbook at the Science Press booth; and East China Normal University Press launched a partnership with Cengage Group to expand the reach of its academic review journal.

Children’s books remain a staple rights category, though BIBF’s international director acknowledged that the physical children’s market in China is contracting, not from demographic decline alone, but from a structural shift toward digital formats, toys, and IP merchandise.

Thus, a fair that was once primarily a rights marketplace has become something more complex: a diagnostics platform for an industry in the middle of a format revolution. The books are still there. But the question China is asking—faster and more openly than most—is what surrounds them.